The present invention is directed generally to optical transmission systems. More particularly, the invention relates to optical transmission systems including optical receivers and receiving methods for use therein.
Optical communication systems transport information by generating optical signals corresponding to the information and transmitting the optical signals through optical transmission media, typically optical fiber. Information in various formats, such as audio, video, data, or any other formats can be optical transported through many different networks, such as local and long distance telephone, cable television, LAN, WAN, and MAN systems, as well as other communication networks.
Optical systems can be operated over a broad range of frequencies/wavelengths, which are suitable for high speed data transmission and are generally unaffected by conditions external to the media, such as electrical interference. Also, information can be carried using multiple optical wavelengths that are combined using wavelength division multiplexing (“WDM”) techniques into one optical signal and transmitted through the optical systems. As such, optical fiber transmission systems have the potential to provide significantly higher transmission capacity at a substantially lower cost than electrical transmission systems.
Optical WDM systems were not initially deployed, in part, because of the high cost of electrical signal regeneration/amplification equipment required to compensate for signal attenuation for each optical wavelength throughout the system. The development of the erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) provided a cost effective means to optically regenerate attenuated optical signal wavelengths in the 1550 nm range. In addition, the 1550 nm signal wavelength range coincides with a low loss transmission window in silica based optical fibers, which allowed EDFAs to be spaced further apart than conventional electrical regenerators.
The use of EDFAs essentially eliminated the need for, and the associated costs of, electrical signal regeneration/amplification equipment to compensate for signal attenuation in many systems. The dramatic reduction in the number of electrical regenerators in the systems, made the installation of WDM systems in the remaining electrical regenerators a cost effective means to increase optical network capacity.
However, the number of wavelengths/channels used in a WDM system is limited to specific wavelength ranges in which the optical amplifiers can amplify optical signals. Therefore, the number of wavelengths/channels used in the WDM system is also limited by how closely the signal wavelength can be spaced within the wavelength range of the amplifier.
The channel spacing in optical systems is limited by a number of factors, one of which is the modulation technique used in the optical transmitter. For example, direct modulation of the laser is the most cost effective technique for imparting information onto a carrier wavelength, because it avoids the need and the expense of an external modulator for each wavelength in the system. However, at high bit transmission rates, direct modulation results in excessive linewidth broadening and wavelength instability which limits the wavelength spacing in WDM systems.
In WDM systems, the wavelength spacing also can be limited, in part, by the ability to effectively separate wavelengths from the WDM signal at the receiver. Most optical filters in early WDM systems employed a wide pass band filter, which effectively set the minimum spacing of the wavelengths in the WDM system. The development of effective optical filters, namely in-fiber Bragg gratings, has provided an inexpensive and reliable means to separate closely spaced wavelengths. The use of in-fiber Bragg grating has further improved the viability of WDM systems by enabling direct detection of the individually separated wavelengths. For example, see U.S. Pat. No. 5,077,816 issued to Glomb et al. The use of fiber Bragg gratings to separate individual signal channels from WDM systems and provide the individual signal channels to photodiode receivers remains standard practice in many direct detection systems.
As the signal channel spacing in WDM system continues to decrease, it has become necessary to write increasingly narrow bandwidth fiber Bragg gratings. While narrow fiber Bragg gratings can be effectively written with today's technology, the refractive index of the fiber Bragg gratings and its reflective bandwidth varies with temperature. Typically the reflective bandwidth will vary by approximately 10 pm/° C. In lightly populated optical systems, the fiber Bragg gratings can be made sufficiently wide to account for drift in the reflective bandwidth. In more densely packed systems, it is necessary to control the drift of the fiber Bragg grating to ensure that the correct signal channel is received.
Most optical systems employing stabilized fiber Bragg gratings use various temperature controlling methods to stabilize the reflective bandwidth of the fiber Bragg grating. While this method is generally acceptable, it does not account for operational variations that occur in the fiber Bragg grating reflectivity and the wavelength of the transmitter. The inability of temperature tuned methods to fully account for operational variations will become an increasing problem as the channel spacing in WDM systems continues to decrease. Accordingly, there is a need for improved optical systems including optical receivers that can be controlled to receive signal channels in dense wavelength division multiplex systems.